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Roger Edward Kuntz
Roger Edward Kuntz (January 4, 1926 – August 22, 1975) was a highly accomplished Southern California landscape painter and a member of the Claremont Group of painters - professors and graduates of Pomona College, Scripps College, and the Claremont Graduate School. A figurative artist with an eye for abstract form, he won critical acclaim for striking compositions that transform an unusual array of subjects, including tennis players, domestic interiors, freeways, road signs, bathtubs and the Goodyear Blimp. A retrospective exhibition of his work, at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA in 2009, was aptly titled "Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction". In the exhibition catalogue, curator Susan M. Anderson wrote: "Kuntz's work of the late 1950s and early 1960s quintessentially embodied the experimentation, fragmentation, and paradox in American culture of the time."
Roger Kuntz was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1926, the second son of Helena Grace Towle Kuntz and Clyde Antoine Kuntz, a U.S. Army pilot whose father had emigrated from the Alsace-Lorraine area of France. Soon after Roger's birth, the family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, where Clyde Kuntz died in a plane crash in 1929. His widow took their two young sons to California, moving from San Francisco to Riverside to Coronado and, finally, to Lomaland, home of the Theosophical Society's community of artists, writers and philosophers.
Roger Kuntz began drawing and painting in his youth. After graduating from Pt. Loma High School, in 1943, he enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. He dropped out for two years to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps and returned in 1946 to study art and psychology. Upon graduation, in 1948, Kuntz married fellow student Margaret Durr and enrolled at the Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University). He studied with artists Henry Lee McFee, Millard Sheets, Sueo Serisawa and Carlos Lopez and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1950. His classmates included painters Paul Darrow, Douglas McClellan and Karl Benjamin and sculptor Jack Zajac.
Kuntz and his wife spent four months traveling in Europe in 1950 so that Roger could visit museums and develop ideas for paintings of European scenes. The couple's only child, Mary Margaret, was born in 1951. The family lived in the Claremont area until 1963, when they moved to Laguna Beach.
Exhibition success came early to Kuntz, who won an honorable mention and cash prize at his first public showing, at the Pasadena Art Institute in 1948. By about 1950 Kuntz believed that post-war abstract expressionism had run its course and that the time was ripe for the reappearance of structure in art that communicated to the viewer. His first solo exhibition was held at the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego in 1951. Kuntz's work got wider exposure in the early 1950s in national competitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the National Academy of Design in New York. His first international exhibition was the III Bienal de São Paulo, which opened in Brazil in 1955 and subsequently traveled throughout the United States.
In 1954, upon the recommendation of Sheets, Kuntz joined the faculty at Scripps College in Claremont as a visiting professor of art. Two years later, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant for painting. The $3,000 award allowed him to take a leave of absence from teaching and work on his art full-time. Travels in California and Mexico inspired many of his paintings during that period. As his reputation grew, Kuntz joined the stable of artists represented by Felix Landau, a leading Los Angeles art dealer who maintained a prestigious gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. The relationship continued from 1957 to 1968.
As Kuntz matured, his paintings evolved from relatively traditional landscapes, still lifes and figure studies to much more reductive and dramatic views of freeway overpasses and underpasses, cropped highway signs, and signs carved in deep shadow and light; they embodied Kuntz's search for the union of formal abstraction and mundane reality. Produced from 1960 to 1962 in a palette generally limited to black, white, grays and greens, these paintings compose his most highly acclaimed body of work.
Though devoid of people and cars, the distinctive images portray a stark, man-made environment designed to transport Southern California's growing population at high speeds. In 1962 and 1963, Kuntz also built a series of aluminum sculptural constructions based on traffic signals. His original interpretation of California car culture captured the attention of critics and curators who viewed the work in the context of Pop art and Kuntz was included in the first national survey of Pop Art organized by John Coplans, editor of Artforum magazine, in 1963. Kuntz had a pensive, naturalistic sensibility unlike other Pop artists, including Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.
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Roger Edward Kuntz
Roger Edward Kuntz (January 4, 1926 – August 22, 1975) was a highly accomplished Southern California landscape painter and a member of the Claremont Group of painters - professors and graduates of Pomona College, Scripps College, and the Claremont Graduate School. A figurative artist with an eye for abstract form, he won critical acclaim for striking compositions that transform an unusual array of subjects, including tennis players, domestic interiors, freeways, road signs, bathtubs and the Goodyear Blimp. A retrospective exhibition of his work, at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA in 2009, was aptly titled "Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction". In the exhibition catalogue, curator Susan M. Anderson wrote: "Kuntz's work of the late 1950s and early 1960s quintessentially embodied the experimentation, fragmentation, and paradox in American culture of the time."
Roger Kuntz was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1926, the second son of Helena Grace Towle Kuntz and Clyde Antoine Kuntz, a U.S. Army pilot whose father had emigrated from the Alsace-Lorraine area of France. Soon after Roger's birth, the family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, where Clyde Kuntz died in a plane crash in 1929. His widow took their two young sons to California, moving from San Francisco to Riverside to Coronado and, finally, to Lomaland, home of the Theosophical Society's community of artists, writers and philosophers.
Roger Kuntz began drawing and painting in his youth. After graduating from Pt. Loma High School, in 1943, he enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. He dropped out for two years to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps and returned in 1946 to study art and psychology. Upon graduation, in 1948, Kuntz married fellow student Margaret Durr and enrolled at the Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University). He studied with artists Henry Lee McFee, Millard Sheets, Sueo Serisawa and Carlos Lopez and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1950. His classmates included painters Paul Darrow, Douglas McClellan and Karl Benjamin and sculptor Jack Zajac.
Kuntz and his wife spent four months traveling in Europe in 1950 so that Roger could visit museums and develop ideas for paintings of European scenes. The couple's only child, Mary Margaret, was born in 1951. The family lived in the Claremont area until 1963, when they moved to Laguna Beach.
Exhibition success came early to Kuntz, who won an honorable mention and cash prize at his first public showing, at the Pasadena Art Institute in 1948. By about 1950 Kuntz believed that post-war abstract expressionism had run its course and that the time was ripe for the reappearance of structure in art that communicated to the viewer. His first solo exhibition was held at the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego in 1951. Kuntz's work got wider exposure in the early 1950s in national competitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the National Academy of Design in New York. His first international exhibition was the III Bienal de São Paulo, which opened in Brazil in 1955 and subsequently traveled throughout the United States.
In 1954, upon the recommendation of Sheets, Kuntz joined the faculty at Scripps College in Claremont as a visiting professor of art. Two years later, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant for painting. The $3,000 award allowed him to take a leave of absence from teaching and work on his art full-time. Travels in California and Mexico inspired many of his paintings during that period. As his reputation grew, Kuntz joined the stable of artists represented by Felix Landau, a leading Los Angeles art dealer who maintained a prestigious gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. The relationship continued from 1957 to 1968.
As Kuntz matured, his paintings evolved from relatively traditional landscapes, still lifes and figure studies to much more reductive and dramatic views of freeway overpasses and underpasses, cropped highway signs, and signs carved in deep shadow and light; they embodied Kuntz's search for the union of formal abstraction and mundane reality. Produced from 1960 to 1962 in a palette generally limited to black, white, grays and greens, these paintings compose his most highly acclaimed body of work.
Though devoid of people and cars, the distinctive images portray a stark, man-made environment designed to transport Southern California's growing population at high speeds. In 1962 and 1963, Kuntz also built a series of aluminum sculptural constructions based on traffic signals. His original interpretation of California car culture captured the attention of critics and curators who viewed the work in the context of Pop art and Kuntz was included in the first national survey of Pop Art organized by John Coplans, editor of Artforum magazine, in 1963. Kuntz had a pensive, naturalistic sensibility unlike other Pop artists, including Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.